Fastest mobile network in South Africa

The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASA) has ruled that Vodacom has the right to claim to have the fastest mobile network in South Africa.

Vodacom’s recent advertising campaigns used the tagline “the fastest network for smartphones”.

MTN ASA complaint against Vodacom

MTN lodged a complaint with the ASA, saying that Vodacom’s claim is unsubstantiated, dishonest and misleading.

MTN argued that its network outperformed Vodacom’s network in some areas during certain periods.

“The [fastest network for smartphones] claim implies that Vodacom outperforms all competitors in all regions at all times, which is not the case,” MTN said.

Vodacom shows proof

Vodacom showed evidence of its superior network performance based on research from Michael Charnas of Catalyst Research & Services, and statistics from Ookla.

Vodacom highlighted that the research they presented is filtered for smartphones only, which therefore applies to its advertising claims.

ASA ruling on the fastest smartphone network in SA

The ASA found that the Catalyst report confirmed that Vodacom’s network outperformed its competitors on both download and upload speeds for smartphones.

“Vodacom outperformed its competitors by a significant margin on average download and upload speeds between October 2012 and June 2013,” the ASA said.

The ASA also noted that Vodacom outperformed its competitors when looking at Ookla’s Speedtest.net statistics.

The ASA subsequently dismissed MTN’s complaint, and ruled that Vodacom’s claim to have the “fastest network for smartphones” is substantiated.

In a separate ruling the ASA ruled that Vodacom may not use the claim “the fastest 3G network”, because of the fact that speed test results used multiple technologies, not only 3G and should not reflect a single technology only.

Effectively the ASA said that “fastest network” is acceptable but “fastest 3G network” not.

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